The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics: Jacques Rancière's Critique of Jean-François Lyotard

Jacques Rancière contents that especially after 1990, Jean-François Lyotard caused a deviation in politics and art that can be expressed as an "ethical turn". According to him, Lyotard leads politics to an ethical turn by absolutizing dissensus as a wrong (tort) or disaster; and by reducing aesthetic experience to the status of sheer witnessing the unrepresentable he leads also arts to an ethical turn. The present article shall discuss only the ethical turn of aesthetics. From Rancière's point of view, the problem in the field of aesthetics and art today is that the political nature of the aesthetic field, which is essentially political and intellectual, has been reduced to ethics and on this occasion its political capacity has been taken away. Rancière explains the formula of this reduction, which he thinks Lyotard have applied, as combining aesthetic autonomy with Kantian moral autonomy through Kant's theory of sublime. This study shall address first Rancière’s claims and focus on how the aforementioned ethical turn in aesthetics and art took place and then in the last section shall try to evaluate the legitimacy of the allegations by also addressing the criticisms made against Rancière in particular for his criticism of Lyotard.